Poll Tax Research Articles

‘A Poll Tax on wheels’: Might the move to privatise rail in Britain have failed?

Rail privatisation was a controversial, widely unpopular policy whose implementation was not inevitable. This article employs counterfactual history methodology to examine whether the move to rail privatisation in Britain might have failed. It places the privatisation proposals in context by examining opposition within the Conservative Party and British Rail. The paper then focuses on three key counterfactual questions, including the significance of New Labour's reversal of its commitment to renationalise rail under its ‘third way’ policy and the possible consequences had the move to privatise rail failed. Based on the historical evidence available, it concludes that the move to rail privatisation could have failed, and that performance would have been better had rail remained an integrated, nationalised industry.

Invisible Black Politics: An Analysis of Black Congressional Leadership from the Inside

For most of American history, black Americans were excluded from the political process. Even after the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, for decades, especially in the South, blacks were prevented from voting through various institutional tactics (e.g., poll taxes and literacy tests), violence, and intimidation. As a result, most political institutions through the mid-twentieth century had few or no black faces. With the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the Fifteenth Amendment was codified, and blacks began to vote and participate in the political process in unprecedented ways.

Legitimate Absenteeism: The Unconstitutionality of the Caucus Attendance Requirement

Dubbed by the Washington Post as “undemocratic,” the caucus system for selecting delegates to national party presidential nominating conventions tends to disenfranchise identifiable factions of voters, including deployed service members, religious observers, persons with disabilities or in poor health, students who attend school away from home, and shift workers unable to leave work during caucus hours. This Note contends that eligible party voters have the constitutional right to vote in their political parties’ caucuses without being physically present. It presents three central constitutional arguments that raise doubts about the constitutionality of the physical attendance requirement of many state party caucuses: first, that the attendance requirement may violate the First Amendment associational rights of voters; second, that it may breach Fourteenth Amendment equal protection of the right to vote; and third, that it may constitute an unconstitutional poll tax. This Note proposes four alternatives to the present caucus system that could eliminate or mitigate the potential unconstitutionality of the physical attendance requirement. Additionally, it examines which actors are best situated to reform caucuses. It concludes that the most effective avenues toward reform are an associational rights judicial challenge or congressional legislation.

Rethinking Gender and Agency in the Satyagraha Movement of 1913

The paper is an assessment of women's agency in the Satyagraha movement of 1913 in Natal, South Africa, through the biographical accounts of three Indian women. 1 The campaign was fought against discriminatory measures that challenged the status of Indian wives in South Africa and imposed a £3 poll tax on ex-indentured laborers. Well over 20 000 men and women participated in this struggle. By profiling the lives of Mrs Bai Fatima Sheikh Mehtab, Miss Valliamma Munuswami Mudliar and Mrs Kasturba Gandhi, my purpose here is not only to illuminate the multiple personal and physical challenges women endured in the struggle, but simultaneously reflect some Indian women's contribution to decision-making and public participation.

Unpublished Demotic Ostracon from Medinet Habu Dealing with Poll Tax

Unpublished Demotic Ostracon from Medinet Habu Dealing with Poll Tax

Keith M. Finley . Delaying the Dream: Southern Senators and the Fight against Civil Rights, 1938–1965 . (Making the Modern South.) Baton Rouge : Louisiana State University Press . 2008 . Pp. 340. $40.00.

This book explores the role that the United States Senate's southern Democratic caucus played in obstructing the achievement of substantive civil rights reform. Keith M. Finley examines all of the rhetorical dimensions of the many arguments marshaled by southern senators against legislation to enact a federal anti-lynching statute, repeal poll taxes, create a permanent Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC), end segregation in the South, and protect black voting rights. In this detailed assessment of political rhetoric and the legislative process, Finley finds both diversity within southern white opposition to racial change and continuity in how southern senators tried to slow its momentum. His study broadens our perspective on the civil rights movement, reminding us of the importance of national political events and, ironically, the national democratic process that empowered the southern caucus's program of “strategic delay.” Developed primarily by Senator Richard Russell of Georgia, “strategic delay” relied on manipulating Senate rules covering filibustering and cloture to thwart the progress of civil rights legislation from the late 1930s until the mid-1960s. By the 1930s, black voting power outside of the Deep South spurred the realization among members of the southern caucus that civil rights advocates were not going to stop pushing for change no matter how many battles they lost. Continued success in stymieing their program depended upon crafting a lasting coalition across regional and party lines. To attract northern Democrats and conservative Republicans, most southern senators moderated their most venomous racial rhetoric, replacing it with a bevy of legal, constitutional, political, and, upon occasion, even religious arguments. Under Senator Russell's tutelage, the southern caucus also recognized the political utility of compromise. Concessions on smaller, less significant reforms, such as the Soldier Voting Act of 1942, diminished the appearance of knee-jerk obstructionism, earning the goodwill of non-southern senators and making strident opposition to other civil rights legislation more palatable to their colleagues. Softening their racial rhetoric and employing constitutional and political arguments were combined with a masterful manipulation of Senate rules and seniority to become the heart of “strategic delay.” The southern caucus thus hoped to slow the movement for racial reform until it expired from a lack of momentum.

The electoral geographies of two segregationist (“Jim Crow”) referenda in Alabama

At the conclusion of the American Civil War, the states of the former Confederacy rapidly added sections to their state constitutions and legal statutes to codify racial segregation and limit the social, economic and political options for their African American citizens. These laws became the foundation for the Jim Crow system of racial segregation. Although such laws have been found unconstitutional, some have survived in state constitutions and statutes as legal relicts. Using the traditionalist–modernizer model and Thomas Frank’s concept of the Great Backlash, we examine the electoral geographies of two referenda in Alabama to delete Jim Crow era provisions from the state’s constitution. Although 59% of Alabama voters supported deleting the state’s constitutional ban on interracial marriage in 2000, a slight majority supported maintaining the unenforceable constitutional sections requiring poll taxes and segregated schools in 2004. We find the geographic pattern of voting on both referenda was substantially associated with the traditionalist–modernizer model and Great Backlash as they pertain to race, religious conservatism, and views towards public education and taxes.

1381 and the Malthus Delusion

What were income trends before the Industrial Revolution? Clark (2007b) argued both theoretically and empirically that pre-industrial income fluctuated, but was not trending upwards, a position Gunner Persson labeled “the Malthus Delusion.” Clark (2010), in particular, estimated that on average English income 1200-1800 was as high as in 1800. In contrast Broadberry et al. (2010) estimate income tripled between 1270 and 1800. One key test of early income estimates is the share employed in farming. Here I show from the Poll Tax returns that in 1381 only 56-59 percent of the English population was engaged in farming, implying income equivalent to that of 1800.

Learning from the Long Civil Rights Movement's First Generation: Virginia Foster Durr

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] You think you are the first generation who's ever done this; you ought to go out and learn some things. Louisville activist Anne Braden, whose own work with southern progressive movements began in the 1940s, offered that advice to Sue Thrasher, a Braden protege and student organizer in the 1960s. That call to learn from an earlier generation inspired Thrasher, along with historian Jacquelyn Dowd Hall and fellow student activist Leah Wise, to begin recording in the early 1970s the memories of veteran southern progressives. At the time of the project's inception, all three women were working in Atlanta for the newly formed Institute for Southern Studies. In 1973 Hall left for the University of North Carolina, where her commitment to recovering voices from the South's earlier radical traditions became one of the driving impulses behind her founding of the Southern Oral History Program (SOHP). Two years later, that ongoing interest in learning from first-generation Civil Rights activists, combined with a new SOHP initiative on southern women, brought Hall and Thrasher to the Wetumpka, Alabama, home of Virginia Foster Durr. Like her longtime friend Anne Braden, Durr stood as a living embodiment of what Hall would later term the Long Civil Rights Movement. (1) Born in Alabama in 1903, Durr grew up in Birmingham hearing stories of her slaveholding ancestors. Though the family's wealth had declined significantly by the early twentieth century, Durr formed an early identification with elite society that never completely faded, even as she later fought against institutions of race and class privilege. You could not be around Virginia without acknowledging and just observing that she did lay claim to coming from aristocracy, Thrasher recalled. Durr took pride in her aristocratic roots but also demonstrated an early unwillingness to play the role of the stereotypical southern belle. Her entry into political activism came in the early thirties, when she and her husband, Alabama attorney Clifford Durr, moved to Washington, D. C. There Clifford served in the Roosevelt administration, while Virginia became active with the Women's Division of the Democratic National Committee, especially its work to abolish the poll tax. In association with other like-minded New Dealers, including Eleanor Roosevelt, Durr became in 1938 one of the founding members of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, one of the South's first interracial organizations that actively opposed segregation. Her work for voting rights continued throughout the 1940s, and she served as a lead organizer for the National Committee to Abolish the Poll Tax, all the while raising four daughters. She was an ardent supporter of Henry Wallace's 1948 bid for the presidency on the Progressive Party ticket and ran that same year for the United States Senate as the Progressive Party's candidate from Virginia. In 1951 the Durrs returned to Alabama, where Clifford established a law practice in Montgomery. For a time, Virginia scaled back her political activism, partly in an effort to shield her family from reprisal. Yet, in 1954, she came under public scrutiny when Senator James Eastland, from Mississippi, called her to testify in New Orleans before his Internal Security Subcommittee. Eastland failed to draw convincing links between Durr and subversive activity; her chief sin, as Durr later put it, was not in being a Communist but rather in refusing to become an anti-Communist. The publicity surrounding the hearing, however, did expose Durr as an opponent of segregation. From that time on, she made little attempt to conceal her racial politics and became an active supporter of the emerging Civil Rights Movement, most famously giving aid to Rosa Parks during the years surrounding the Montgomery Bus Boycott. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] With Clifford at her side, Virginia sat with Hall and Thrasher for initial interviews in the spring of 1975. …

Rabbi Yihye Yitzhak Halevi and his Relations with Imam Yahya

The chief rabbi of Yemen, Rabbi Yihye Yishaq Halewi, had a special relationship with the ruler, the Imam Yahya, after the Turks left Yemen in 1918. I will discuss several aspects of this relationship, including the public needs of his congregation in the capital city San‘a, such as problems of ownership of the land of the Jewish quarter and collection of the poll tax, aid to Jewish congregations throughout Yemen in maintaining the public order, and efforts on behalf of community leaders who suffered from saving children from the Orphans’ Decree.

Review: Thatcherism and Scotland

Margaret Thatcher and the Scots is a topic about which few could write dispassionately but David Torrance maintains an admirable balance in this well-researched account of her three governments and their fortunes. He draws on media reports, archival material and a series of attributable interviews with Conservative politicians and their opponents to gain real insight into the politics of the era. Some myths are debunked. Thatcher did not really hate the Scots; Scotland was not used as a guinea pig for the poll tax; the Sermon on the Mound was not as provocative as it became in popular memory; large amounts of money were funnelled into Scotland and the welfare state was not dismantled. One might add that Scottish attitudes to welfare were not so different from those south of the border, although Torrance tends to play up the contrasts here. So why was Thatcherism, as the Iron Lady herself admitted, a political failure in Scotland?

Poll tax and preventive cardiology in Australia

Poll tax and preventive cardiology in Australia

The origin of metic status at Athens

It is widely held as uncontroversial that throughout the classical period male inhabitants of Attica were divided between three distinct categories – Athenian citizens, metics (regularly translated as ‘resident aliens’) and slaves – and that Athenian society had, therefore, a tripartite structure. The opportunities available to and requirements demanded of a man depended on his category. Those foreigners permanently resident in Attica – those with the legal status of ‘metic’ – were, unlike slaves, free, but, unlike citizens, they could not own land, vote in the Assembly, or serve as adikastesor as a magistrate; in addition, metics were required to pay a poll tax (themetoikion) and to have a citizen sponsor (prostates). In this paper I seek to challenge not the nature of the distinction between citizens and metics but instead the assumption that the distinction was made throughout the classical period. I suggest that the growth of the Athenian citizen population after the Persian invasion of 480–479 demands that the origin of metic status be situated around the middle of the fifth century, and that the occasion on which the Athenianpolisfirst defined metic status is likely to have been the occasion on which it first took an interest in restricting who might become a citizen: in 451/0, with the passing of Perikles' citizenship law.

A Persian Mahabharata: The 1598-1599 Razmnama

By the time the Mughal Emperor Akbar ascended the throne in 1556, at the age of thirteen, the vast Turco-Mongol empire dominated virtually all of the northern part of the Indian subcontinent and would continue to expand during his reign. The empire was an Islamic state, but the Muslim elite were a minority. Akbar's maintenance of power depended upon the success of his strategy to incorporate Hindu and other religious and political factions into the imperial bureaucracy, and to allow a degree of autonomy in various regions of the empire. Beyond admitting non-Muslims into the royal administration and household?where Hindus worked in such positions as military commanders, finance ministers, tax collectors, scribes, cooks, and artists?Akbar abolished the bitterly resented poll tax (jizya) on non-Mus lim males, required by Islamic law, and a pilgrimage tax on Hindus traveling to their sacred sites. He also married the daughters of many high-ranking Hindus throughout the empire to further gain the loyalty of the non-Mus lim population. Akbars policies?liberal but also politically expedient? resulted in five decades of imperial reign of exceptional tolerance for non Muslim art, science, and religious views. In 1574, Akbar established a translation bureau (maktab khana) at his capital of Fatehpur Sikri. Here, the emperor's top scribes and secretaries were given the task of translating a range of Sanskrit texts, including the Rajatarangini (The History of the Kings of Kashmir) and the Ramayana, into Persian. Akbar also commissioned Persian translations of Arabic encyclopedias and histories and the complete Baburnama?the Chagatai Turkish memoirs of Babur, Akbar's grandfather and the founder of the Mughal dynasty.1 The activities of Akbar's translation bureau indicate his desire to do more than pacify Hindu opponents of his rule. The project was part of a larger, long-term effort to make Persian the official language of the Mughal Empire and the common tongue not only at court but also among lower ranking members of the imperial bureaucracy. Clerks, scribes, and secre taries were compelled to learn Persian, and, indeed, a multi-tiered curricu lum was developed to teach the official language. Large numbers of Hindus

Taxation and the worlds of welfare

Please note that consumption tax data in the paper are estimated from expenditure data in all cases, and are not directly taken from the LIS. The wording of footnote 6 is misleading, as it suggests that the consumption tax data were obtained from LIS for some countries; this is not the case. This is important to note because our method cannot take into account exemptions of consumption tax for lower-income taxpayers, and will overstate the regressivity of consumption tax in such cases. The authors would like to apologize for this error. We have re-estimated the consumption tax results using the LIS’s v14 category, which is defined as ‘All other types of direct taxes such as consumption tax, church tax, poll tax, etc.’ The conflation of consumption tax with other taxes makes this variable of limited use for our purposes, but does allow some insight. This variable is available for several countries, including three of the countries for which we had estimated sales tax from expenditure (France, Switzerland, and the UK). It proves to be regressive for those three countries, to a similar magnitude as in our paper; and it is regressive for all other countries except Norway. These calculations are available from the authors.

The Historical Context of Voter Photo-ID Laws

The issue before the U.S. Supreme Court in the Crawford case (Crawford v. Marion County Election Bd. 2008) was whether a law (Indiana Senate Enrolled Act No. 483) passed by the Indiana legislature requiring most voters to show a photo ID in order to cast a ballot violates the First and Fourteenth Amendments. Plaintiffs argued that it works an unfair hardship on many people who do not have the government-issued documents that count as a legitimate ID (Indiana Democratic Party et al., 12–16). They argued that the law, in effect, constitutes a poll tax, inasmuch as there are costs to obtain the right kind of photo ID, costs that unduly burden many eligible citizens wanting to exercise their right to vote.

27. Registro di pagamenti: della λαογϱαφία?

Editio princeps of P.Berol. 11517 r., a register written on the recto of a novel (Daulis: Pack 2 2468 = LDAB 4554) at the end of the 2nd century AD. The register is a list of taxpayers, most probably of the poll tax. It is unusual for two reasons: first, the mention of the paternal great grandfater of the taxpayer; second, a number, placed before the name of every taxpayer, the meaning of which remains unclear. Many names of taxpayers are rare, some are typical of the Socnopaiu Nesos village. A proposal about the provenance of the register (and of the novel) is put forward.

Taxation in Colonial America

Taxation in Colonial America examines life in the thirteen original American colonies through the revealing lens of the taxes levied on and by the colonists. Spanning the turbulent years from the founding of the Jamestown settlement to the outbreak of the American Revolution, Alvin Rabushka provides the definitive history of taxation in the colonial era, and sets it against the backdrop of enormous economic, political, and social upheaval in the colonies and Europe. Rabushka shows how the colonists strove to minimize, avoid, and evade British and local taxation, and how they used tax incentives to foster settlement. He describes the systems of public finance they created to reduce taxation, and reveals how they gained control over taxes through elected representatives in colonial legislatures. Rabushka takes a comprehensive look at the external taxes imposed on the colonists by Britain, the Netherlands, and Sweden, as well as internal direct taxes like poll and income taxes. He examines indirect taxes like duties and tonnage fees, as well as county and town taxes, church and education taxes, bounties, and other charges. He links the types and amounts of taxes with the means of payment--be it gold coins, agricultural commodities, wampum, or furs--and he compares tax systems and burdens among the colonies and with Britain. This book brings the colonial period to life in all its rich complexity, and shows how colonial attitudes toward taxation offer a unique window into the causes of the revolution.

Black Working-Class Political Activism and Biracial Unionism: Galveston Longshoremen in Jim Crow Texas, 1919-1921

J. V. BELL, A FEDERAL AGENT WHO INVESTIGATED THE 1920 LONGSHOREMEN'S strike in Galveston, Texas, expressed alarm over militancy of island's black and white workers, which had prompted Governor William P. Hobby on June 7 to declare martial law on island. It was expression of class and racial assertiveness by black unionists that particularly disturbed Bell. He attributed this militancy to their long association with white trade unionists, even though Galveston's longshoreman locals, like other southern locals of International Longshoremen's Association (ILA), were racially segregated. In a report from Galveston on August 21, 1920, Bell complained, negroes in Galveston, through their long association on an equality basis with white Union Labor, have about arrived at time where they think they should be accepted on a par or equal with white race. He warned that the insolent manner of local African Americans toward white race will, in time, lead to serious disorders between races. In fact, he reported indignantly, I have never been in any city where negroes are so impudent and insolent as they are in Galveston. (1) Bell's racism notwithstanding, he did put his finger on an important source of black longshoremen's assertiveness. Despite degradations of Jim Crow and institutionalized racism at time, including in labor movement, biracial unionism--that is, organization of black and white workers into segregated locals--had given longshoremen a sense of empowerment. Of course, this was not what architects of racial segregation had anticipated, but as Bell suggested, cooperation with white unionists on docks generated a militancy that reached its fullest expression during strike. The crushing defeat inflicted on striking longshoremen, after months of martial law, suspension of Galveston's entire police force and city government, and occupation by Texas militia, was a major setback for Texas labor movement and those who had used biracial unionism to promote organized labor and civil rights in South. Racial cooperation on waterfront extended to politics as well. Although militancy of Galveston's black longshoremen was part of a national pattern in First World War era, black working-class participation in city politics provided another vibrant source of empowerment. (2) Black longshoremen formed an important activist bloc in a prolabor, reform-minded political coalition that captured power in 1919 city elections and again in 1921. At a time when many African Americans and poor whites in South were being disenfranchised through poll taxes, white primary, and other devices, black unionists in Galveston asserted themselves on waterfront, joined struggle against Jim Crow, and engaged in formal political process. The failure of strike of 1920 strained race relations and led to collapse of ILA locals by mid-decade, but black and white longshoremen continued their cooperation after strike, including an attempt to form an independent labor party in elections of 1920. The dockworkers' political and union activism did more than strain race relations, however; it also sharpened intraracial divisions in Galveston's black community. The literature on longshoremen's strike to date has not examined role of black, or even white, working-class politics before, during, and after strike. Until recently, in fact, black labor activism and experiences of black urban workers, including those on Galveston's waterfront, had remained largely hidden, ignored, or marginal at best in studies of southern labor and black history. Eric Arnesen has pointed out that just as labor history has had something of a 'race' problem, African-American history too has had its own 'class' or 'labor' problem. (3) Due particularly to works by Arnesen, Michael K. Honey, Tera W. Hunter, Robin D. …

Poverty and Charity in the Jewish Community of Medieval Egypt (review)

Reviewed by: Poverty and Charity in the Jewish Community of Medieval Egypt Boaz Shoshan Keywords Boaz Shoshan, Mark R. Cohen, Poverty and Charity in the Jewish Community of Medieval Egypt, Poverty, Charity, Medieval Egypt, Jewish Communities, Fustat, Old Cairo, Cairo Geniza Mark R. Cohen. Poverty and Charity in the Jewish Community of Medieval Egypt. Jews, Christians, and Muslims from the Ancient to the Modern World. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005. Pp. xi + 287. Poverty has been a permanent feature of past reality and it will presumably stay with us for quite a while. In this respect, Jewish communities everywhere were no exception and had their own poor. Already some years ago, S. D. Goitein, calculated that in the middle of the twelfth century, of an estimated total of 3,300 Rabbanite Jews of Fustat (Old Cairo), about one in four was on the public dole. Fear of death from starvation is commonplace in the Cairo Geniza, by now the most famous “graveyard of discarded pages.” At the beginning of the thirteenth century economic hardship increased as a result of plagues and famine, as well as migration from Fustat to Cairo, which left behind the poorest of the community. By the fourteenth century impoverishment was in full swing, as reflected in about twenty Geniza “decrees” regarding the poor that were issued by the office of the Nagid. In its social construction, poverty in the Geniza world was, generally speaking, no different from other societies. There were the chronically poor—those living on the margins who failed to make ends meet, the sick, women, orphans, and foreigners—and there were those who “fell from their wealth” and experienced a crisis. Now Mark Cohen of Princeton, a leading Geniza scholar, has published a pioneering book-length attempt to go beyond such generalizations and comprehensively probe the experience of the poor of the Geniza world and the mechanism developed for their support. On the basis of close to 900 documents, among them more than 300 alms and donor lists, he has produced an excellent and erudite work which is most likely to remain the best research on poverty and charity in the Islamic world of premodern times. Who were the Jewish poor in medieval Fustat? In the lack of agreed-upon criteria for drawing the dividing line between the poor and non-poor and an ability to apply it to specific individuals, one has to go by the definitions of the Geniza people themselves as echoed in the documents. Thus, when a Jewish man writes that he may have to sell his prayer shawl (talit), it is clear how desperate he was. Obviously, lack of basic [End Page 412] food, as complained by one impoverished teacher who could not buy even one loaf of bread, and similar statements about hungry families in petitions coming from the needy, are indisputable evidence. Lack of clothing is another repeated complaint. Most vulnerable to sudden impoverishment were those who lived at the margins of subsistence, the underclass or low-paid “working poor.” Cohen provides a profile of their occupational composition (pp. 55–59). The onerous annual poll tax imposed by the Islamic state was levied on an individual basis and failure to pay, as in the case of one Hiba b. Zafran, could result in corporal punishment (p. 40). Hence, subsidies for the poll tax were high on the community’s philanthropic agenda and a recurring element in private charity for the poor. The largest category of the poor featuring on the lists of beneficiaries was that of foreigners hoping to find support in the Fustat community, which was famous for its munificence. The foreign Jewish presence in the city has to be considered in a wider context, since from the mid-eleventh century nearly all the chief communal personalities in the Egyptian capital were newcomers or descendants of recent immigrants. The sheer quantity of names with foreign toponymics, accompanied by the evidence of the letters of the foreign poor, attests to the constant influx of outsiders who found no work with which to sustain themselves and their families. As Cohen points out, the Geniza case emerges more strikingly when compared with early modern England before...